Peking University, Mar.11, 2010: The delegation of the University of Pennsylvania, led by President Amy Gutmann, visited PKU on Mar.10 for the grand opening of the PKU-UPenn Day. PKU President Zhou Qifeng, Executive Vice President Wu Zhipan and Lin Jianhua, Vice President of PKU Health Science Center Fang Weigang, Dean of School of International Studies Wang Jisi, Dean of Guanghua School of Management Zhang Weiying and Dean of Law School Zhu Suli attended the ceremony.

PKU and UPenn sign cooperation framework

Amy Gutmann, President of UPenn, delivers speech

President Zhou Qifeng gives present to President Gutmann

The PKU-UPenn Day lasted for one day. In the morning, the agreement of cooperation framework between the two universities was signed at Yingjie Overseas Exchange Center and the whole day’s events began.

President Zhou Qifeng gave a warm welcome to the guests from UPenn. In the welcome speech, he reviewed briefly about the history of UPenn the time when Benjamin Franklin established it, and the world-leading academy level. Meanwhile, he took the example of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin’s study at UPenn to show the historic relationship between PKU and UPenn. After that, President Gutmann delivered a speech titled "From Co-existence to Collaboration: Integrating Liberal Arts and Professional Education".

 "Together We Are Facing Choices"

President Gutmann came straight to the point in her speech, that all universities, including PKU and UPenn, were facing a basic problem -- to choose between general education and career education, and between academic research and social work. She said both were right, but “the scarcity of our lifetime” made everyone realized that we were all pushed to making choices.

"For a Better Educational Mode"

President Gutmann stressed the point that to reach both goals, universities in the world had to break down the separation and limit between different countries and cultures, and have discussions on ways to provide education on all aspect. She said, under the education mode today, considering the work problem, most of university students in the US tended to choose popular majors like business administration, and lost the access to general education as a result.

However, with the knowledge updating in a high pace, the students will be dangled in the flow of time, just like the emergence and disappearance of digital products. In reality, universities should make their students able to love and achieve lifelong learning. And background of humanities learning is needed this way. She said, “We are to create a better education mode not only to teach the student working skills, but also to build up their quality of humanities.”

 "General Education, Like Water, is Intangible but Flexible and Powerful"

President Gutmann further convinced the audiences by giving some real examples that happened in her life. One of them is that a successful person in the financial world admitted that it was not Public Finance and Accounting course, but Japanese Culture and Art course that made the biggest contribution to his success. She believed that general education is powerful in terms of making people know about history, focus on long-term goals and understand social demands, and it was like water, intangible but flexible and powerful.

When she came to the new educational mode that UPenn was exploring at present, she said, UPenn was trying to integrate general education and career education and provide more choices to students, like management and life science. At the same time, professors were also looking for a more creative way for teaching, and were willing to communicate and cooperate with PKU and other universities to build up bridges between different subjects.

At last, President Gutmann answered questions from the audiences about cooperation between subjects and student quality building, etc. Then President Zhou Qifeng and President Gutmann gave presents to each other and took a photograph together.

After the speech, the PKU-UPenn Conference was held. Professors from School of Stomatology, School of Law and School of Business from the two universities had discussions on the topics of oral cavity health, "China-US relationship: opportunities and challenges" and "China-US business relationship: globalization of Chinese enterprises".

Translated by: Qin Yixiao

Edited by: Jacques

Source: PKU News (Chinese)